Kevin Zabo is a freshman point guard at San Diego State who has silky skills and an urbane disposition, who spent three days being mentored by two-time NBA MVP Steve Nash when he was 15, who has played for some of the top prep academies and AAU clubs in North America, who once was ranked the No. 2 prospect in Canada behind Andrew Wiggins, who played alongside more than 20 teammates currently with Division I programs and another half-dozen already in the NBA.

It probably doesn’t happen if a diplomat from the African nation then known as Zaire doesn’t take his teen-aged nephew to Washington, D.C., in the early 1980s to attend high school, and if that impressionable teen-ager doesn’t see a precocious freshman from North Carolina make the game-winning jumper in the NCAA championship game.

And it probably doesn’t happen if, 12 years later, genocide doesn’t ravage tiny Rwanda and trigger a war in neighboring Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) that kills millions more, compelling Ndavo Zeph Zabo to move his young family to the safety and serenity of Canada.

“It was all a journey, an incredible journey,” Zeph says. “To see Kevin playing college basketball, it was a vision, a dream coming true. I can’t tell you how proud I am, and how grateful I am.”

His son represents a fundamental shift in recruiting philosophy for SDSU, which traditionally has populated its roster with California players. Its last three starting point guards were from San Diego, Los Angeles and Sacramento. Zabo finished his high school career at Brewster Academy in Wolfeboro, N.H. – 10 miles from the Maine border, 2,574 miles from San Diego, upper right corner of the continental U.S. to lower left.

The 6-foot-2 Zabo certainly plays like the others – quick, aggressive, cerebral, coachable. He just didn’t hop in a car and drive to campus.

He was born in Sherbrooke, Quebec, and grew up in the Ottawa suburb of Gatineau, shielded from the rebel militias and ethnic enmity of central Africa, speaking French almost exclusively until 7th grade, knowing only snowy winters and mild summers. But he is also cognizant of his family’s past – respectful of it, humbled by it – and how it shaped his future.

“I know,” he says, “I’m very fortunate.”

Zabo’s mother, Jackie Mukamayire, is from Rwanda and both her parents were killed in the 1994 genocide that claimed between 500,000 and 1 million lives, or roughly one in five citizens. Some of her brothers died, too. Mukamayire attended college across the border in the Congo in the late 1980s, met Zeph Zabo there and then moved to Canada when she realized a return to her homeland was no longer feasible. Zeph left his native Congo to finish an undergraduate law degree in Paris, then joined her a year later as his homeland spiraled into chaos and bloodshed.

Kevin, their second son, was born in 1995.

“How could you want your son to live in a country where more than 6 million people have been killed, murdered, some buried alive, and thousands of women and girls raped every year?” Zeph says. “There is no way I could plan for my son to live in those countries or in Africa in those conditions.”

Zeph grew up like most African kids, obsessed with soccer and idolizing Pele after his historic African tour with Brazilian club Santos. In 1974, when he was 7, Zaire became the first black African nation to qualify for a World Cup.

But it was Jordan that captivated him since seeing him coolly drain a jumper against Georgetown’s 2-3 zone with 15 seconds left in the 1982 NCAA championship game. There is the family photo of Kevin, barely a year old, dunking in the living room on a mini-hoop with Jordan’s likeness on the backboard. There was the trip to Chicago when Kevin was 7 and the picture of him pensively gazing at the majestic Jordan statue in front of the United Center, legs spread, ball thrust above his head, gliding, flying.

“That was my passion,” says Zeph, who for nine years was an officer in Canada’s federal anti-trust agency. “Every day I came back from work and had things to do with Kevin in basketball. I separated myself from my friends. I’d take him to practice. On weekends we’d travel for tournaments, waking up at 1 a.m. sometimes, driving 14 hours, thousands of miles every month.”

SDSU freshman point guard Kevin Zabo, at age 1, dunking on his Michael Jordan mini-hoop in the living room. Photo courtesy of Zabo family.

SDSU freshman point guard Kevin Zabo, at age 1, dunking on his Michael Jordan mini-hoop in the living room. Photo courtesy of Zabo family.

That was in Canada, where ice hockey still rules. Zeph admits the plan always was to send his son to the United States for high school and college, even if it put considerable distance between them. When Kevin was in 7th grade, Zeph already had made inquiries to famed Oak Hill Academy in Virginia. When Kevin was 15, he was living on his own.

He started at St. Mark’s School, an hour west of Boston. The basketball was good, with teammates such as Nik Stauskas (Sacramento Kings), Alex Murphy (Duke/Florida) and 7-foot Kaleb Tarczewski (Arizona). But St. Mark’s had a rule that you had to play a different sport each season, and Zabo reluctantly played football and watched his roommate, a star basketball prospect, get badly hurt. “That kind of traumatized me,” he says.

So he transferred to Montrose Christian in Rockville, Md., another prep basketball power where he played on another team loaded with Div. I recruits.

“The housing was a problem,” Zabo says. “We stayed in a house, it was really just not organized. Sometimes we’d be hungry and not have enough food. On the court it was a good experience. But the off the court issues, my parents weren’t comfortable with me being a young kid there.”

Next stop: Wolfeboro, N.H., a town of 6,269 on the shores of Lake Winnipesaukee. He spent his final two years at Brewster Academy and won a National Prep Championship last season. His backcourt mate, Devonte Graham, is a freshman at Kansas.

He wasn’t on the Aztecs’ radar, however, until Justin Hutson returned to SDSU from UNLV in the spring of 2013 and realized the only point guard on their recruiting board was Jordan McLaughlin from Etiwanda High in Rancho Cucamonga. McLaughlin was wavering between the Aztecs and USC, where the man who recruited him at SDSU, Tony Bland, had left to be an assistant. (And, indeed, after Zabo committed to SDSU, McLaughlin chose USC.)

So Hutson quietly flew to Washington, D.C., to watch Zabo represent Canada in a global showcase event. The following week he went to Toronto, where Zabo played with the Canadian AAU club CIA Bounce that produced UNLV’s Anthony Bennett and Kansas’ Wiggins, the No. 1 overall picks in the last two NBA drafts.

SDSU point guard Kevin Zabo, at age 7, visiting the Michael Jordan statue in Chicago. Photo courtesy of Zabo family.

SDSU point guard Kevin Zabo, at age 7, visiting the Michael Jordan statue in Chicago. Photo courtesy of Zabo family.

Bennett played a huge role on selling SDSU to Zabo over a list of courters from major conferences, saying of Viejas Arena: “I’ve never played in such a hostile environment.” Zabo’s humility, chiseled from a turbulent family history and the deep African sense of respect, was what sold SDSU on Zabo.

“We met his mom and dad,” Aztecs coach Steve Fisher said. “They are wonderful people. They could not express how appreciative they were for us recruiting him and providing him an opportunity to come here and play at a high level of basketball. It’s unlike many situations, where recruits think you owe them a favor just to bring them in. It was almost the exact opposite.

“And that’s who Kevin is. He epitomizes what a team player and an ultimate teammate can be by the way he interacts with the other players, the way he practices, the way he relates to coaches.”

San Diego is 2,574 miles from Wolfeboro, 2,380 miles from Gatineau, 9,000 miles from central Africa. His parents still live in Canada. Most of his relatives are still in Africa. A kid far away from home was going farther away.

“I’ve been away from home since my freshman year in high school, so already I’m used to this,” Zabo says quietly in a hallway at Viejas Arena. “I never really get homesick like that. I talked to my father about it and he said, ‘You have to make the sacrifice. If it’s your first choice, you have to go there.’